I painted the 3" version of the soon-to-be-painted 16" x 20" Poolside work I plan next.

Again, rough values, no small brushes or detail.

To give you an impression of the size of these, here are the two sketches I've done of this one next to a dime.

They're small. And fun, actually. I'm surprised by the satisfaction I get in painting these rough thumbnails of what is to be a larger work.

I learned with this sketch that lighter is better. The warm areas feel balanced to me. The cool of the blue, the warmth of the wooden fence in the background. The sunlight on the woman herself and in the palm fronds. You can't see it in these smaller versions, but she is eating up the sunshine in the peace found by a backyard pool. I hope to capture that in the larger work.

I'm satisfied with the palette I've chosen for this. Next step is to get over the chicken sensation I get before starting something new. Yep, starting a work always makes me jittery. But I ignore it, or it would never happen. I'm excited to see how it turns out.

In kind of a sentimental mood, I painted this for my mom's Mother's Day card during lunch today. I've been thinking a lot about my daughter, who leaves my nest this year, and I've been reminiscing about my own childhood.

It's not often that I have a difficult day at work. But today started out with a heated discussion and then the morning slid from there. Lunch, which is my painting break, was a very, very welcome respite and started a nice turn-around for me.

On lunch, I wanted to work more on folds of clothing and monochromatic shading, so I typed "woman coat" into Google images and for some reason, a picture of children came up. The girl in the picture was so delighted and happy that I wanted to absorb her mood.

She felt like sunshine to me, so I tried yellow. I like the result. It fit her well.

You can click on her if you want to see the source photo.

And from there on out, the day was great.

Tonight, I should turn on the Graffiti portion of the site. Let's see how far I get.

While I try to figure out how to finish my last painting, I'm off to the next one. I won't wait a month between them this time.

I own a book called The Victory Garden. It was a PBS show, and there's a beautiful book based upon it of gardeners and their gardens. Fantastic stuff... and I need to get better at drawing people and their clothing. So I picked the first picture in the book and did a value sketch of it today.

Here's the original:

So I want to take a different approach with this - more abstract and colors of my own choosing, rather than try to paint strictly what's there in the picture, as I have done.